We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

"The Outermost House" Henry Beston
Author (1888-1968)

"Entertainment"

June 30th World Whale and Dolphin Day, July 4th World Day for Captive Dolphins visit a dolphinarium today....help close it down

In its inglorious heyday of the 1960s and 70s there were over 30 dolphin shows in the UK. Read how the dolphin -slave trade ended in the UK, nearly 20years ago. Behind the Captive Smile

A dolphin killed at Futo in Japan in a government sanctioned 'drive fishery.' 'Drive fisheries' exist mainly to provide dolphins to the captivity industry in Japan and abroad. There are fifty shows in Japan and a wild dolphin sold into a life of slavery, fetches around £20,000 to fishermen. Those dolphins that aren't selected for purchase by industry personnel are processed into meat and fetch around £100 - 150 to fishermen.
The value I now see in dolphins is not the value of their meat, but of the wonder they incite in us.
Izumi Ishiienlarge

Millions of innocent parrots are kept in captivity worldwide. If we would line up all imprisoned wild caught and bred birds on the planet, they would reach all the way around the Earth at the equator, perhaps even twice.
The few birds that managed to escape imprisonment outside their natural habitat are now branded "invasive species" making it sound as if they came from outer space and on their own will. In many countries it is illegal to release exotic birds, denying them their nature-given right to fly. Absurd!

Parrot populations in their native habitats are declining.

The main causes are:

Market demand for parrots as pets

Large profits of the pet industry

Lack of laws that makes keeping birds illegal

Corruption and Lies

Trapping because of poverty, as often believed and used as justification, is not a main cause. In Brazil only recently 72 wild animal traffickers have been arrested. Those 72 individuals are responsible for the trade of HALF A MILLION wild animals per year.

VERY FEW people causing BIG problems to the parrots and take away such a beautiful wild animal from all of us who love to see them fly free.
Parrots need to come off the market without exceptions, because seeing or even offering them for sale causes even more demand.

Breeders say, that they are doing CONSERVATION WORK. It should not matter what breeders say, but they should be looked at what they are: BUSINESSES!
No parrot is a pet, no matter if wild caught or bred. It is only those who are in the business of seeling parrots, who say, that they can't be given back to nature. As if a human slave after generations of slavery would not be able to survive in Freedom.

If YOU want to help parrots and others birds getting back their Freedom and help avoid ending up more of them in captivity:

Don't visit or buy at places (hotels, restaurants, parks, zoos, pet stores, internet companies etc.) where there are captive parrots and other birds for sale, in cages for exposition, used for commercials etc.) and let the owner, manager or employees know, why you decided to do so.

Make your voice heard, write or speak to government officials telling them, to not allow anymore breeding, keeping and selling of parrots and other birds and this should be turned not only into national, but international law.

Freedom means to be able to choose. As long as cage doors are locked, there is no choice.- Loro Bolivia

Horse racing trainingA gun is used to familiarise the horse to the starting gun to ensure it will not stall with fright and will leave the starting stall.enlarge

Whipped racing horseDuring training it is known, horses get beaten. During the race the riding crop is passed near the horse's eyes and this is enough to remind them of training methods and increases speed.enlarge

The pride of the bull-'fight'

As I walk through this wicked world searching for lightness in the darkness of insanity, I ask myself is there only pain and hatred
and misery and each time I feel like this inside, there's one thing I want to know, what's so funny 'bout peace,love and understanding?

What's so funny 'bout love, peace and understanding? Elvis Costello and The Attractions.enlarge

Bullfight horseman

.... But man, proud man
Drest in a little brief authority
Most ignorant of what he's most assured
His glassy essence- like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep

Shakespeare; Measure for Measure Act 11, Scene 2

The Cruelty of Horse-Drawn Carriages

Every year, the list of accidents involving horse-drawn carriages grows, and horses continue to endure pain and suffering because of this outdated practice. The only way to end this cruelty is to ban it permanently and give these horses the freedom they deserve. Forcing horses to pull oversized loads isn't romantic - it's cruel. Horses are forced to toil in all weather extremes, dodge traffic, and pound the pavement all day long. These gentle animals suffer from respiratory ailments because they breathe in exhaust fumes, and they develop debilitating leg problems from walking on hard surfaces. In some cases, horses have even dropped dead from heatstroke after working in scorching summer heat and humidity.

The scene painted on the wall of this zoo enclosure may fool some zoo visitors, but is unlikely to fool the Polar bear into thinking he is in the Artic regions.

Repeated exposure to a dolphin swimming in a pool or a Polar bear pacing in a concrete enclosure encourages people to consider wildlife as isolated objects or as servants to human needs and desires, rather than as integral elements of an eco-system.

I shall teach pity to human beings and shall be the interpreter of all dumb creature and soothe the boundless suffering which is not only of man.

He who seeking his own happiness torments with the rod, creatures that are desirous of happiness shall not find happiness hereafter.The Bhudda

There is no beast on earth nor bird which flieth with its wings but the same is a people like unto you.Qur'an

He who saves one soul (or animal) is as if he has saved all of humanity. Qur'an

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood
But against principalities, against powers
Against the rulers of the darkness of this world
Against spiritual wickedness in high places.St. Paul Ephesians Chapter 6

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.
Isaiah

Brothers... love all God's creatures, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, and every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all embracing love. Love tha animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's
intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals, they are without sin and you with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it and leave traces of your foulness after you- alas it is true of almost everyone of us.Dostoyevsky; The Brothers Karamoz, Book V1 Chaper 3

Factory farms, food

Battery hens
If a robin red-breast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage
How feels heaven when
Dies the billioneth caged battery hen
VIVAenlarge

Caged calf
Mothers and calves WOULD remain closely bonded for several months until the calf reaches adulthood. But in farming, mother and baby are swiftly seperated for financial gain, causing great distress.

Uncaged information on the flyer; INTERNATIONAL ANIMAL RIGHTS DAY, December 10

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.William Ralph Inge

"There are around forty-four million sheep in the UK national flock including about fifty pure breeds and three hundred crossbreeds. Over twenty-two million are lambs under one year of age whilst seventeen million are breeding ewes. Most sheep are slaughtered as lambs" 2.enlarge

Finned hammerhead shark

The price of soup
Sharks' fins being cut off and the live animals being discarded to dieenlarge

Sentenced to Death
This pig was not properly stunned before her throat was cut. She struggled so violently that she slipped her shackles and fell into the blood pit below. The slaughterman laughed as he shackled her back up. She was disembowelled, cut to pieces and packaged for the supermarket shelf. Who knows, you may have eaten her.VIVAenlarge

Eye and tear of a dophinWhen I am going to kill dolphins, they shed tears and close their eyes. How is it possible for me to kill animals that shed tears and close their eyes at the moment they are killed
Izumi Ishii, former Japanese dolphin killer enlarge

PETA conducted an undercover video investigation into Crestview Farm, a division of Willmar Poultry Company, which is based in Minnesota, the number one turkey-producing state in the U.S.

PETA's investigation documented a farm manager who was strangling young birds and haphazardly bludgeoning dozens of others with what he calls his "killing stick." A tape provided to the local prosecutor shows dozens of individual birds being bludgeoned - and many others, who were not seen on the tape, also suffered this abuse. Birds who did not die immediately were still thrown in the "dead pile," where they were left to suffer slow and agonizing deaths as they lay among the bloody corpses of other birds.

Up to 300 million turkeys are killed every year for food in the United States. Millions are killed in the UK too, in celebration of the birth of A Messiah.

Since Man crawled blinking out of the mud and began to climb trees he has mistakenly assumed that the special relationship he thinks he has with God entitles him to regard the animals who share his planet with him as inferior beings to be beaten, eaten, pampered, kicked, laughed at, tortured and worked to death.

'You act like an animal' is in a way a strange sort of compliment, if by that you mean any animal other than Man. For what other animal has murdered, bombed, napalmed, raped, assassinated, gassed, exterminated and regularly enslaved his own kind since the beginning of time? What Man fails to realise is that through his own stupidity Man is bringing about his own extinction as well as that of all the other animals on this planet.

Animals other than Man tend to be better behaved. They don't get drunk, beat each other up at football matches or take photographs of each other with no fur on. They don't need Popes, Bishops, Prime Ministers, or Kings to teach them how to behave and, probably most important of all, they don't use money.

from "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"Mike Harding

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow cruching with depressed head supasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels...

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth...
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.
I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

from "Song of Myself"Walt Whitman

Vivisection, bloodsport, whaling, other

Felix was a macaque monkey imprisoned in a laboratory
at Oxford University laboratory in the UK. He experienced torment and mutilation
for years in a series of brain function experiments. His captors refused to release him despite a continuing international outcry.

'A nice day out for children in the Faroe Isles'
Cetacea Defenceenlarge

'A nice day out for children in the Faroe Isles'
Cetacea Defenceenlarge

'A nice day out for children in the Faroe Isles'
Cetacea Defenceenlarge

Waterloo Cup, Altcar, near Liverpool, before the hunting ban in England and Wales.
LACSenlarge

Muzzled greyhounds chase a hare during a coursing meet at Clonmel Racecourse in County Tipperary, Eire, last year. Following political pressure, the Irish Coursing Club was forced in 1993 to muzzle greyhounds at enclosed coursing meetings However a muzzled dog can kill a hare, and this does sometimes happen, with the hare being battered and tossed by the dogs.
LACSenlarge

Enclosed coursing takes place in an enclosed field. Hares are trapped in advance from the wild, boxed and transported to the coursing field. They are then 'trained' to acclimatise them to the field and to teach them to run up the centre of the field, as is required for 'good' coursing.

Hares are kept together during these training weeks, causing great stress for a naturally solitary animal and increasing the risk of disease. The netting itself is also traumatising, and the whole experience may have an effect on female hare reproduction - further damaging an already endangered species.

May 2008Spring brings bloody waters in Norway - the whaling season has started.
Norwegian whalers yesterday made the first kill of the season: a calf.Man the only animal that blushes or needs to. Mark Twainenlarge

Navy May Deploy Dolphins to Fend Off Terrorism; 2007
Associated Press

K-Dog, a bottle nose dolphin, trains with a tracking device attached to his pectoral fin.

The Navy has been training marine mammals since the 1960s and keeps about 100 dolphins and sea lions. Most are in San Diego, but about 20 are deployed at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Ga.

Yangtze river dolphin; Declared extinct 2007What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit.For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man.
All things are connected.Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth.
If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.
This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.
All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.Chief Seattle 1855
enlarge

Yangtze river dolphin; Declared extinct 2007; The dolphin that man could not live alongside.

The Yangtze river dolphin is declared extinct. It is the first large animal to be wiped from the planet for 50 years, and only
the fourth entire mammal family to disappear in 500 years. And it was driven to its death by mankind... By Jeremy Laurance Published: 08 August 2007

After more than 20 million years on the planet, the Yangtze river dolphin is today officially declared
extinct, the first species of cetacean (whale, dolphin or porpoise) to be driven from this planet by human activity.

An intensive six-week search by an international team of marine biologists involving two boats that ploughed up and down the world's
busiest river last December failed to find a single specimen.

Today, the scientific report of that expedition, published in the peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Society, Biology Letters,
confirms the dolphin known as the baiji or white-fin in Chinese and celebrated for its pale skin and distinctive long snout, has
disappeared.

To blame for its demise is the increasing number of container ships that use the Yangtze, as well as the fishermen whose nets became
an inadvertent hazard.

This is no ordinary extinction of the kind that occurs frequently in a world of millions of still-evolving species. The Yangtze
freshwater dolphin was a remarkable creature that separated from all other species so many millions of years ago, and had become so
distinct, that it qualified as a mammal family in its own right. It is the first large vertebrate to have become extinct for 50 years
and only the fourth entire mammal family to disappear since the time of Columbus, when Europeans began their colonisation of the world.

The three previous mammal families gone from the face of the Earth are the giant lemurs of Madagascar, which were eliminated in the
17th century, the island shrews of the West Indies, probably wiped out by the rats that accompanied Colombus on his voyage, and the
Tasmanian tiger, the last known specimen of which died in captivity in 1936. (The most famous creature to have become extinct in the
past 500 years, the Dodo, was a bird.)

Sam Turvey, conservation biologist at the Zoological Society of London, who led the expedition to find the Yangtze dolphin and is
chief author of the paper, said: "The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy. This extinction represents
the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasises we have yet to take full responsibility in our
role as guardians of the planet."

Several other species are "just hanging on" in the Yangtze and could disappear within a few years unless action is taken now, Dr
Turvey warned. They include the Chinese alligator, the finless porpoise and the Chinese paddlefish, which grows up to 7m long but has
not been seen since 2003.

"There is a lot of interest now in the baiji - but it has come too late. Why does no one pay attention to a species until there are
none left? We really have to use the baiji as a wake-up call to act immediately to prevent it happening again.

"What is poignant is that the Yangtze is a fast river system with a unique range of endemic species. Once they are lost there, they
are lost everywhere," he said.

The object of last December's expedition was to rescue any baiji found and remove them to a 21km-long oxbow lake in the nature
reserve of Tian'ezhou for an intensive breeding programme. Each of the two boats operated independently with scientists scanning the
water with binoculars - dolphins have to surface to breathe - and listening with hyprophones for the distinctive whistles. Despite the
technology, they found nothing.

"We used a very intensive survey technique. Both of the boats counted the same number of porpoises - we saw everything that was
there. We didn't see a single dolphin," Dr Turvey said.

The cause of the freshwater dolphin's demise was instead all too plain to the investigators. It had become a victim of the world's
most populous country's race to get richer. One tenth of the world's population live in the Yangtze river basin. During the expedition,
scientists counted 19,830 ships on the 1,669km of the river they surveyed - one large freight vessel every 800m.

The Yangtze dolphin navigated by sonar - its eyes are useless in the murky water - but in a motorway jammed with container ships,
coal barges and speed boats, its sonar was deafened and it ran a high risk of being hit or torn by propellers.

An even greater threat came from the nets and 1,000m lines of hooks used by fishermen.

Although they did not intend to catch dolphins, the creatures became entangled in the nets or lacerated by the bare hooks - almost
half of all dead baiji found in the past few decades have died in this way. In addition, pollution had fouled their natural habitat and
completion of the Three Gorges Dam worsened the decline in smaller fish on which the baiji fed.

The last mammal families to become extinct

Island shrews
Extinct: 1500
The West Indian "island shrews" or nesophontids are known only from sub-fossil remains. They were about the size of a rat and died
out following the accidental introduction of black rats, with which they could not compete, from European ships. They were the most
ancient land mammals of the West Indies and their extinction represented the loss of an entire mammalian order.

Giant lemurs
Extinct: 1650
The giant lemurs of Madagascar weighed up to 180lb, more than a silverback gorilla. They died out as a result of hunting by humans.

Tasmanian Tiger
Extinct: 1936
The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, left, looked like a large striped dog, with a wolf's head and heavy tail. It was actually a
marsupial, related to the kangaroo, with a pouch to raise its young. European settlers feared it and killed it whenever they could.
Thylacines never bred in captivity - the last known one dying in Hobart zoo on 7 September 1936.

I do not see why the very existence of an invisibile world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal....I do not know what the sweat and blood tradegy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all aour idealities and faithfullnesses, are needed to redeem...The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and our unwillingnesses, our faiths and our fears...In these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments...sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth.

These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief with help create the fact. The 'scientific' proof that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolise) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great battle had been gained: 'Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there!'
from "The Will to Believe"

William James

THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF ANIMAL RIGHTS

Insomuch as there is ample evidence that many animal species are capable of feeling, we condemn totally the infliction of suffering
upon our fellow creature and the curtailment of their behavioural and other needs save where this is necessary for their own individual
benefit.

We do not accept that a difference in species alone (any more than a difference in race) can justify wanton exploitation or
oppression in the name of science or sport, or for use as food, for commercial profit or for other human gain.

We believe in evolutionary and moral kinship of all animals and declare our belief that all sentient creatures have rights to life,
liberty and natural enjoyment.

A blackbird came to the garden,
Near the honeysuckle
Where the paving slabs are spread
With crumbs - and seeds - and other morsels;
A robin joined him there
And not a word was said
On colour, creed
Nor even inclination.
No word of 'being black'
Or tinged with 'red'.
Their forms, the emblems of their species -
Are an evolution common to us all.
So when the air is humid
Or thick with unreason,
Stop and listen to the message
The robin
And the blackbird
Call.

Carole Parsons

The World's Need

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)

So many gods
So many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind
While just the art of being kind
is all this sad world needs.

I am the voice of the voiceless
Through me the mute shall speak
'til the deaf world's ear
be made to hear
the cry of the wordless weak.

From lab, from cage, from kennel,
from slaughterhouses, comes the wail
of my tortured kin
who proclaim the sin
of the mighty against the frail.

For love is the true religion
And love is the law sublime
And all that is wrought
where love is not
will die with the touch of time.

Oh, shame on the mothers of mortals
Who have not stopped to teach
of the sorrow that lies
in an animal's eyes;
the sorrow that has no speech.

The same power formed the sparrow
that fashioned man; the king
The god of the whole
gave a living soul
to furred and to feathered thing.

And I am my brother's keeper
And I will fight his fight
and speak the word
for beast and bird
til the world shall set things right.